This particular book won the 2010 Coretta Scott King Award for illustrator. The illustrator was Charles R. Smith Jr. and he chose to take sepia tone photographs of African Americans of all ages and put the poem “My People” by Langston Hughes with the pictures. Even though this was a very short poem, when you combine it with the pictures it is very moving. It is suppose to be a tribute to the African American race. My favorite feature was the fact that the photographs were done in the sepia tone. This made them more powerful. You could really see the detail yet still tell that they were African American. I will be honest because of this, though I found it moving I probably didn’t get as much out of it as I would have had I been an African American myself. Yet another book, that would be good to use in the introduction to poetry or during African American heritage month in February.
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